


Clean

by ariadnerue



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Fluffy Ending, Thunderstorms, broody thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnerue/pseuds/ariadnerue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had been afraid of thunderstorms when she was human. After she died, she became a thunderstorm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clean

**Author's Note:**

> Season 2 is coming. I'm so scared. Have this fluff.
> 
> I seem to enjoy taking widely-accepted headcanons and turning them upside down. Like I see a lot that Carmilla is scared of thunderstorms because of the bombs and stuff that broke her out of her coffin, but I think she'd be more scared of small spaces and being submerged. Which makes it all the crazier that she fetched an underwater sword to impress a nineteen-year-old.

She had been afraid of thunderstorms when she was human.

It was such a silly thing to be afraid of, but she was a silly thing too. She was just a naïve little girl, even at the age of eighteen. She’d never left Styria, barely even left her father’s house. She stayed inside and read the books her father brought back from his travels. She was quiet and courteous, like any wealthy girl in the seventeenth century.

Thunderstorms were loud. They were uncontrollable. They didn’t fit into her precious little life. So she was afraid of them.

After she died, she became a thunderstorm.

For centuries she was wild and free and nothing else mattered. Maman had taken her out of that little life of hers, taken her away from that little girl she’d been, made her something powerful and set her loose. She seduced five girls every twenty years and handed them off to Mother without a second thought, considering what she had in return.

Immortality. The entire world opened up when time was no object. Everything went from an ‘if’ to a ‘when’ and it was easy to get drunk on the feeling.

Until love came along and screwed everything up.

Carmilla sighed and tilted her head back, letting the rain wash over her as she sat on the roof of her dorm. She loved thunderstorms now. It was her favorite type of weather.

Only a truly torrential downpour accompanied by lightning cracking the sky and thunder shaking the earth could make her feel clean.

She had tried everything after she’d emerged from her bloody coffin, scrubbed until her skin burned even more than it already was from the sudden exposure to sunlight and fresh air after seventy years submerged. But her entire body was dyed a rusty brown from decades of soaking in blood. It took weeks for the color to fade, for her skin to return to its natural pallor. But she still felt it there, lurking in a much more literal fashion than the flippant expression used by guilty humans, claiming they had ‘blood on their hands.’

They had no idea. Carmilla had blood in her bones by now.

It was a thunderstorm that let her finally breathe.

She’d climbed the Eiffel Tower in the dead of night in the spring of 1952, fully aware of the oncoming storm and drunk off her ass. Maybe if lightning struck the tower while she clung to it, it would be enough to finally kill her. She knew she had lived too long the moment the darkness closed over her head and the blood filled her lungs.

If she hadn’t been so drunk, she’d have remembered that the Eiffel Tower was designed to sustain lightning strikes without any harm coming to people on it.

But it wasn’t a total loss. She sat on the observation deck out in the rain, flashing lightning and roiling clouds above and the lights of Paris stretching out below. She was freezing cold and soaked to the bone, and her tears were invisible among the raindrops, her sobs silent in the thunder.

It was two hours before she noticed that the knot that had formed in her stomach the moment Elle had called her a monster was finally loosening.

Carmilla had thought of nothing but Elle while she was in the coffin, and when she emerged she was fully aware that her memories of the girl had been warped and poisoned by it. But being aware of it did nothing to help her. She clung to the twisted version of her she held in her mind, convinced herself she was the monster she was believed to be.

She started to heal after the Eiffel Tower. The pouring rain made her forget the blood. It made her feel empty, and feeling empty was a vast improvement over all the suffering she was used to.

The problem was, she had nothing to fill the void. So her healing stalled out. And things only got worse when Maman found her again and she was roped back into a life that constantly reminded her that she was a monster.

It was only when a certain Laura Hollis came along that she had something real to fill that empty space.

Carmilla couldn’t help the smile that crept onto her face at the thought of her girlfriend. She was probably getting worried; Carmilla had been sitting out in the rain for over an hour and it was getting late.

She sighed again and closed her eyes. Just a few more minutes, then she’d go back inside.

Carmilla had now known Laura longer than she’d known Elle. It was strange to realize, but Elle hadn’t been part of her life for very long. Just a couple of months, in fact. Maybe it was because Elle was her first love, or maybe it was because Elle betrayed her, or maybe it was because she was buried for seventy years as a consequence of loving her, but she had loomed much larger in Carmilla’s life in the century that followed.

It had taken Carmilla years to separate fact from fiction when it came to Elle. To parse through her memories and remember what was true and what had been fabricated by her desperate mind in the dark beneath the ground. And it was easier now, with Laura. She found herself comparing the two less and less until she didn’t at all, and when she drove the Blade of Hastur into the Light beneath the Lustig, it was with the quiet realization that she’d finally moved on.

Hell of a time to realize that, but whatever.

Lightning flashed in the distance and Carmilla counted to five in her head before the thunder answered. The storm was moving on. She pushed her sopping hair out of her eyes and began the climb back down to her dorm. She even managed to sneak in through the window without making a sound, but the effort proved to be in vain because Laura was still awake anyway.

She was sitting on her bed, propped up on her yellow pillow, curled in a cocoon of blankets as she read a book by the light of the owl lamp on her headboard. She looked over when she heard the rain dripping from Carmilla onto the floor.

“Hey,” Carmilla whispered, offering her a small smile.

“Hey,” Laura replied, immediately getting to her feet and crossing to where Carmilla was standing by the window. She paused when she reached her, her gaze raking over her as if she was checking for injuries and then settling back on Carmilla’s eyes. She reached forward hesitantly, waiting for her to flinch back, and ran her hands softly up her arms when she didn’t. “You’re soaked.”

“Yeah,” Carmilla laughed lightly and looked down at the puddle she was making on the floor. This was the best part. This was when all that emptiness, all that space she’d made sitting out in the rain, could get filled up with the light that always seemed to shine off of Laura. It was warm and thick and sweet like honey and if there was one thing she could drown in forever it would be Laura.

And drowning was still kind of a big deal for her.

“Let me get you a towel,” Laura said quietly, and before Carmilla could stop her she was in the bathroom rooting around for a clean towel. Carmilla didn’t move, not wanting to drip water everywhere, and she almost laughed at herself for it. For how much she cared now.

But Laura cared now too. Laura knew Carmilla still suffered from her past, and she knew when to give her space. She knew when to let her sit out in the rain and when to be mindful of her touches and her words.

But she also knew when Carmilla just wanted to be near her, and the gentle smile on her face when she came back out with a big fluffy beach towel was more than Carmilla could have asked for.

There was a lot of giggling on Laura’s end and a lot of breathy laughter from Carmilla as they clumsily tried to dry her off without getting water everywhere. Laura would pause every so often just to take Carmilla’s face in her hands and meet her eyes and smile at her.

If Carmilla still needed to breathe, she would be breathless.

They eventually peeled her wet clothes off of her and Laura forced her into a dry tank top and sweatpants that were an inch too short and before she knew it Carmilla was in Laura’s blanket cocoon with her and they were just lying there in the dark, listening to the rain.

“You okay?” Laura finally asked. Carmilla could tell by the tone of her voice that she’d wanted to ask since the moment she came in the window, but she’d restrained herself. One hand was running softly up and down Carmilla’s arm, the other cupping her cheek and stroking her cheekbone with her thumb. Carmilla sighed contentedly.

“I’m okay,” she whispered, wrapping her arms tighter around Laura’s waist. She wanted to say she was sorry if she worried her. Sorry she dripped water all over the floor. Sorry she didn’t tell her where she was going before she left. Sorry she was damaged. Sorry sorry sorry. But the way Laura smiled at her, the way she sighed when she leaned forward and buried her face against Carmilla’s neck, the way her breath against her skin filled her up with warmth, reminded her she didn’t have to say she was sorry. She really was okay. So instead, she pressed her lips to the top of Laura’s head and murmured, “Thank you.”

“Goodnight, Carm.”

“Sleep tight, sweetheart.”

“I love you.”

Carmilla squeezed her eyes shut and grinned. No matter how many times she said it, it always made her slow-beating heart race.

“I love you too, Laura.”


End file.
